Learning from examples

The getting started article revealed the
advantages of an SLR and how it ‘thinks’. Now we put that knowledge
into action with a bunch of real situations.

Bird sitting still in bright sunlight

When your subject isn’t moving it makes things so much easier. First of all,
it gives you some time to think about what you’re doing. So instead of worrying
about just getting a shot, you can figure out how to make it a good one.

In the picture above, I’d seen a Great Cormorant sitting quietly at the edge
of a lake in full sunlight. A strong breeze was making a bit of a mess of distracting
waves in the lake behind it (you can see how strong the breeze was by the way those
crest feathers are being ruffled) and so I wanted to blur those waves away.

What’s the main priority?

You want to reduce the depth of field, to make the bird stand out and the mess going
on behind it to blur away. And you control depth of field with your aperture setting.
So there’s your main decision made for you: aperture priority mode.

So you select aperture priority in your mode dial — AV or A or whatever
your camera calls it — and choose a small number. Because a small f-number will give
you a small depth of field. In this example I opened my lens up to the smallest
f-number it could manage, which was f/5.6.

If you look carefully, you can even tell that I chose a big aperture, because I wasn’t
able to get the whole bird in focus. I focused on the bird’s eye, which meant that
the feathers below its shoulders went a bit soft. But that didn’t worry me,
because it also meant those distracting ripples were completely blurred away.

What about the theory?

f/5.6 lets a lot of light through the lens, especially in bright sunlight, so
to ensure you don’t over-expose your shot you’d expect the camera to
only keep the shutter open for a very short time. And sure enough, it chose 1/2000
of a second, which is mighty fast. This had the added benefit of stopping even the
slightest motion blur in that bird’s head.

Fast-moving dragonfly in bright light

In my opinion, the best dragonfly shots show the wings, even if the insect is flying.
Now, a flying dragonfly isn’t the easiest photographic subject to work with, but
the same rules apply. Okay, now at this point I should also clarify something here — the dragonfly
was hovering (not darting) when I took this photo. But those wings were moving more
than fast enough for this exercise.

First of all, what’s your main priority?

Those wings are moving crazy-fast and we want to freeze the action, so our
priority in this case is to prevent motion blur.

What does that mean for your camera settings?

To freeze the action you need to make extra certain you get a fast exposure. So
your first setting is decided for you: Shutter speed priority on the mode dial.
That might be called TV (Time Value) or it might be an S setting or maybe your camera calls
it something different. Once I’d selected that, I chose 1/1250 second for
this shot. The camera then took care of the aperture settings for me.

What about the theory?

1/1,250 of a second might be fast enough to freeze the action of a dragonfly wing,
but it’s not much time for your camera’s sensor to collect light. So
your camera’s going to open its lens aperture up a lot to make up for it, even
in bright sunlight. Big aperture (small f-number) means small depth of
field, which means blurring the background away. And that was fine by me.

Insect standing still in bright daylight

Depth of field can become paper thin when you’re photographing tiny critters.
Therefore the challenge with photographing insects is getting enough of one in focus.

What’s your main priority?

Depth of field. We want as much as we can get, or else that bug is going to
be mostly blurred.

What does that mean for your camera settings?

Aperture priority mode is your first choice for this one, because aperture is
where you control depth of field. You need to pick a big f-number for a big depth
of field. In this shot I went for f/10. Sure, I could have picked a bigger f-number
for a bigger depth of field, but in this case it would have caused some problems.
You see, the big f-numbers result in a small aperture hole and we know that to
make up for that the camera reaches for a slower shutter speed. That might sound okay,
but the problem with a slow shutter speed is that if you jiggle the camera even a tiny bit
during that longer exposure then you will end up with camera shake blur. And macro
photography is unbelievably efficient at showing camera shake blur!

So f/10 was kind of a compromise between getting enough depth of field (aperture setting) and not getting too much
camera shake blur (from the slow shutter speed).

What about the theory?

Providing the camera doesn’t want to go any slower than about 100th second
then it would still probably be okay to work the camera hand-held. But if your
camera is wanting to select shutter speeds like, for example, 25th second, then
that’s just going to be too slow to work hand-held in the incredibly fussy
field which is macro photography, which means you’re going to have to
think of some other options. It might mean using a flash or a tripod. Or perhaps cranking up your ISO
setting to make the camera simulate having a more light-sensitive sensor.

But hey, don’t worry if this is all a little bit too much to take in. Macro
photography is a whole world of its own, and so I wrote a special
2-part introduction to macro photography
explaining all this stuff and a whole lot more.